You know The Purge. It’s the movie series that finds ways to make a night of rampant, legally accepted murder boring as all hell. Now it will be the television series that takes the same premise, drags it out over 10 hours, and conforms it to rating standards.

Neat.

Here is creator/director/writer James DeMonaco explaining the series and shining a light on why The Purge series isn’t written so well:

“Yes! Not an anthology… I guess kind of an anthology — more of an interwoven anthology. They came to me about a TV show, my idea is that you do six or seven storylines. And I would kind of intercut them, use flashbacks.

The idea of why I like the idea of a maybe 10 hour TV thing on this, the one thing you really can’t do on the films is, just because of mere real estate and time, is you can’t get into the nuance and complexity that would drive someone to commit a terrible act on this night. Whether it’s revenge or out of passion, but what might be interesting in a TV show is with a flashback narrative, if you start on Purge Night but you go back to show how people have gotten to where they are. Where you see a couple that’s gone haywire on this night, but let’s show everything that’s led up to this moment of a husband trying to kill a wife — the cheating or the accusations of cheating or money problems. It will be interesting to show those arcs, those dramatic and complex arcs that get people to where they pick up a gun or a knife and kill someone else. I think there’s something cool that we can do with the real estate of TV — 10 hours, potentially.”